Well then I guess I would have been disappointed then. I downloaded the VSD trial last night and quickly realized that wasn't going to work either.


Yep. that's what I did. I was so excited with everything I read that I just went directly to the page and bought it!



Well I have to get out my newsletter this week. I will force myself to use it and hopefully I will be a convert by the end of the week.

hehe I'm sure you'll like it once you start using it Michael, it has quite a lot of features and more coming every so often too. All setup for HTML5 and CSS3 too which is very helpful also. Good luck with it and enjoy your new tool!

Apologies for replying to an old post. Brand new user here - heard of coffeecup editor over the years but haven't used it before. Just downloaded the free/trial version and was pretty shocked that it does not have wysiwyg view. I've read the posts in this thread. Not to be rude or anything, but the excuses for not having wysiwyg sound pretty weak. It basically sounds like there were some technical bugs/issues with the wysiwyg view and rather then fixing them, the wysiwyg option was just removed.

Can I just suggest that instead of trying to be spin doctors and say this is a good thing, just say there were too many bugs/issues with it and it was removed for those reasons. Because the spin doctoring is a real turn off. Not saying this to be insulting - just giving up my opinion as a potential customer. Although due to the lack of wysiwyg i wont be purchasing. I don't care what anyone here says, having a wysiwyg option is always good (assuming it works). It's a hell of a lot quicker for me to enter some text in wysiwyg mode then it is if i have to code in every br, p b etc tag with the text.

I hope at some point you'll add it back in since I don't think I'd ever consider buying an html editor without it, I'm not even bothering to keep the free version because of it.

Take a look at VSD. http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/
It's wysiwyg abilities are way beyond what the editor ever thought of being.

Thanks. I did see that before i made my post. Haven't tried it however since from the screen shots it wasn't clear if it had a source code view plus I didn't see any of the 'standard' text formatting buttons on the screen shots.

For my particular needs now, I basically just need something that'll do basic html text formatting (bold, paraphaphs, breaks, headings, unorder lists, links etc). I don't mean to spam so i wont post a link but I found a free editor that'll do that and has the standard buttons so that anyone with basic familiarity with pretty much any rich text editor will know how to do those basic tasks.

I only posted here because it really does not seem to be a good idea to remove a wysiwyg option from an html editor. From the brief explanation given in this post, it sounds like your wysiwyg editor had similar issues that frontpage had. I can understand wanting to remove the wysiwyg option due to those issues. But it just sounds like used car salesmanship trying to spin removing a feature as a feature itself. Sort of like the used cars salesman saying the engine was leaking oil and it was a pain to fix, so we just removed it so you wouldn't have to deal with that problem. ;p

The latest version of the editor has the ability to have a split screen preview or if you have a dbl monitor setup you can use it that way. It's totally cool to be able to edit the code and see the output in the live preview immediately.

We could certainly explore adding a visual editor component, but that would force us to raise the price substantially which we do not want to do.

The Editor we want to market to our coders and Visual Site Designer towards the non-coders. Intermixing the two just becomes overly complex. That is why when Microsoft discontinued support for that control, it was just the right time to make the decision to separate the two programs and define what we think is best for each. We had been wanting to do that for sometime, so this was the perfect opportunity to do so. Investing such a large amount of time/effort and resources just did not make business sense to develop our own visual editor when we already had Visual Site Designer.

Scott, thanks for the reply. I can totally understand that. My only 'complaint' if you can call it that is trying to make it sound like removing the option was a good thing. I completely understand if it was too complex to maintain and didn't warrant you guys investing the time and money into making it work. But from my view point - the consumer who was looking for html editor, you sound like you're trying to sell me that car without an engine and telling me it's a good thing.

Having a wysiwyg editor for me is a must - because there are times where i'm just doing some simple text changes or formatting changes and it's way quicker and easier to do that in a wysiwyg mode then in the raw code.

I must be a Swedorskian Coder.

WYSIWYG Web site editing inevitably disappoints. It gets you 85% where you want to go, but leaves you high & dry on that last 15%.

Building a WYSIWYG Web editor is tough due to the browser's dynamic, interpretive rendering of a Web page's DOM (document object model) and the HTML, CSS and client-side scripting that specify it. And then there is server-side programming, which is utterly invisible to client-side tools, such as Web editors.

Consider paper, an entirely static medium. It's tough enough building a WYSIWYG word processing program. Despite decades of refinement, MS-Word still produces strange results . MS-Word and Open / Libre Office differ in results from the same files (particularly when vector-based artwork is involved). Happily, limited user expectations for dynamic behavior from pieces of paper (no pull-down menus or AJAX database queries, for example), make building WYSIWYG word processing software practical.

Now consider a medium that can shrink and stretch boundlessly in any direction. Not only can it perform local computations, but also it can send & receive data to & from software running on remote systems. End-users expect this medium to render usefully and appealingly across everything from tiny telephone screens to huge monitors, with browsers that produce varying results. Automated robot clerks must find and properly categorize individual media collections amongst a sea of such collections, else no one will be able to find anything useful.

Client and server programming, search-engine awareness, and so-called "responsive" controls and layouts address these problems, but how is a WYSIWYG editor supposed to allow the Swedorskian Non-Coder to visualize and apply the solutions? It isn't. By the very nature of the medium, WYSIWYG cannot accomplish what is desired. It offers no visibility on large swaths of Web development work.

WYSIWYG Web editing is nonetheless helpful. Use it to its best advantage, as a rapid prototyping and visualization tool. Then solidify your design using a CSS grid framework or perhaps one of the canonical page templates included with the Coffee Cup HTML Editor. (Worth the Editor's purchase price all by themselves, IMHO.) Lay in responsive controls, perhaps with assistance from Coffee Cup's Web Form Builder. Use a little Javascript for site navigation. Apply PHP and perhaps an object-to-relational-database library on the server side. Or maybe invest in learning a CMS (content management system). Test your work on your own local Web server. Do this systematically to build beautiful, functional, platform-tolerant, maintainable Web sites.

Sorry, but all of this is going to require some coding. Once one accepts this fact, WYSIWYG's apparent immediacy fades in importance. Appealing though it seems to be, WYSIWYG just doesn't address Web development's significant problems.

Sincerely yours,
A Swedorskian Coder

I realize not everyone does the same work and even if they do the same work they don't always do it the same way. All i can tell you is that for me personally, not having at least basic WYSIWYG editing tools is a deal break. I use it often enough and it saves me enough time using it that in my opinion it's worth it and more importantly to a company trying to get me to buy their product, it's worth my dollars.

I'm not disagreeing with the devs from coffeecup if they are saying it just wasnt worth investing more of their time and money in maintaining that feature. I would assume they know their user base better then i do So if they think most users aren't really using that feature and it would cost them X dollars to maintain it but it would only generate X/2 dollars, then it makes perfect sense for them to remove it.

The only thing that bothered me was trying to make removing it sound like it was a feature in itself. It's a pet peeve of mine having people trying to spin things rather then just be upfront. I can totally understand and respect the decision to remove the WYSIWIG feature if it was just a money drain for them. Just wish they just said that and didn't try to make it sound like removing something was somehow a new positive feature.